YouTube Subscriber War Exposes Cybersecurity Concerns

YouTube recently helped bring a cybersecurity concern to the forefront. For those who do not keep updated with the YouTube world, PewDiePie, the YouTuber with the most subscribers on the platform, is currently having a subscriber faceoff with the channel with the second most, T-Series. This battle, which has been all over Youtube with many channels attempting to help each series get more followers, has recently exposed a cybersecurity problem, surprisingly not involving a computer. Since November, they have seen two attacks targeting people’s unsecured printers. The vulnerability has roughly affected up to 150,000 machines by playfully printing out messages from the infected printers telling the owners to subscribe to PewDiePie. At the end of the messages, it gets a little more serious and tells the people that they need to make sure to secure their printers.

According to tweets, one of the hackers that has taken ownership for one of the cyberattacks is named, “HackerGiraffe,” and wanted to have a non-malicious attack to show that there was a problem with many printer’s security. While this attack was not harmful in any way, it does show the importance of making sure all of your technology is secured. If these attackers had decided to be malicious, they could have written a script that could have caused these machines to destroy themselves. Luckily, this attack was for the point of awareness.

As we are wrapping up 2018, this attack should serve as a reminder to everyone to set New Year’s cyber resolutions. I think two easy resolutions for everyone would be to increase cyber awareness as well as make sure your business has cybersecurity tools in place such as backups, a password manager, network protection and email archiving to protect your critical data! In the case of printers, people need to make sure that they take the appropriate action to keep the firmware up-to-date and secure the network that it is on if it is connected to WiFi!

Until next time, have a Happy New Year, and as always, stay protected!